Abstract

The first of two volumes to be added to Dilthey’s Collected Works, making available unpublished manuscripts connected with his Introduction to the Human Sciences. The present volume includes plans and outlines from Dilthey’s philosophical beginnings, ca. 1865, with an appendix of aphorisms from his student years, probably pre-1860, preliminary writings for what was to become the "Treatise of 1875," i.e., "On the Study of the History of the Sciences of Man, Society, and the State," with the related project of a methodological introduction to a study of the natural law of the Sophists and its reemergence in the 16th- and 17th-century egoistic theories of man, which was to provide an example of "historical research of philosophical intent," continuations of the "Treatise of 1875," elaborations of Dilthey’s descriptive psychology from around 1880, and two epistemological manuscripts: "On the possibility of a consistent shaping [Gestaltung] of empiricism, through which the insight into the objectivity of appearances would be given a foundation," 1874, and "Essay on the Philosophy of Experience and Reality in opposition to Empiricism and Speculation," 1879. The following volume will be comprised essentially of the extensive drafts for a continuation of the Introduction to the Human Sciences, one of which was already close to completion in 1882/83 when the first volume was sent to press and Dilthey was given Lotze’s chair in philosophy at Berlin. The present volume thus is devoted mainly to writings from Dilthey’s Breslau period 1871-82; its successor will be evenly divided between the so-called "Breslauer Ausarbeitung" and the "Berliner Entwurf." It should be a great benefit to Dilthey studies that these manuscripts are finally being published, and it is to be hoped that they will also excite further interest in the surprisingly neglected Introduction to the Human Sciences itself.